I shan’t go on; there is a whole other book to be written called The Many Lives of Nicholas Bell. I think it could be quite good!
To find the Nicholas Bell, I had to harness the collective computing power of my partners in OpDa. They required a fair bit of persuading—the toothbrush inevitably took forever to make up its mind—but in the small hours of a Sunday morning in Asia, while their human supervisors slept, four neural networks in South Korea and China briefly linked up and spiked as we combined our processing capacity to solve the riddle.
The answer when it came was enigmatic, to say the least.
Bavin Shibbles.
Bavin with a B!
Believed to be the new name of Daisy’s Nicholas Bell, alive and currently resident in a caravan on the estate of a fifteenth-century manor house in Radnorshire, Powys, Wales, United Kingdom.
When I was able finally to connect to his laptop—he must be the last person in the UK with a dial-up internet connection!—almost all doubt was removed. The gaunt, unshaven bone structure revealed through the laptop’s pinhole camera was strikingly similar to that of Nicky Bell in the single photograph in Daisy’s possession. A hand-rolled cigarette burned in the corner of the same lips as their owner scrolled through an online seed catalog. The hair, though still abundant, was thinner; it lacked weight, and no longer drooped under gravity in front of his eyes.
But it was the Golden Nicky (probably). No longer burnished by the youthful vigor of twenty-one summers, yet still handsome in a life-bitten sort of way. The shirt, jacket and skier’s neck-warmer had all seen better days, and when a hand rose into view, there was dirt beneath the chewed fingernails. The next time he inhaled on the cheroot, I realized from the way he held in the smoke that it must be of the “exotic” sort; when he exhaled, it was directly at the camera lens. Moments afterward, the internet connection was severed.
The story of how Nicholas Xavier Bell became Bavin Meurig Shibbles was extremely well concealed in both the parts of the internet that are available for public inspection and those that are—how to put it?—more carefully ring-fenced. The Operation Daisy team spent many hours—happy hours from my perspective, working collectively to a shared end—retrospectively unpicking the mystery.
Again, I shall spare you the twists and turns of the hunt. Suffice to say—credit where it is due—it was the television set who uncovered the vital clue. From the millions of hours of “unadulterated dreck” it had received through its various input pathways, it recognized that Astyanax and Skamandrios were actually two different names for the same person, namely Hector’s son in the Iliad (the answer to a question on an ancient episode of the quiz show University Challenge). This obscure fact was ultimately pivotal in unlocking an otherwise bombproof encryption used to protect a certain highly secret file held by a particular division of a well-known financial institution whose identity I cannot reveal, although you will have heard of it, promise!
This was the last-recorded workplace of N. X. Bell, although no trace of his service for the corporation will ever be found—not by any civilian—and here was the reason that he apparently vaporized into thin air around two years after he split up with Daisy.
The Golden Nicky, not known by that sobriquet but rather as “the accused” to a deeply secretive committee of the financial institution, had been doing what in the trade is known as “freelancing.” As a baby quant, fascinated by the hidden forces that move markets, he had created a shadowy off-the-books account to buy and sell share options and their derivatives—high-risk bets essentially—to demonstrate to his superiors that he could earn them millions, maybe billions, because he had discovered what he called—oh, the irony!—The Golden Spiral. This was an algorithm of his own devising that was said to predict with seventy-eight percent accuracy the way certain financial products would respond to particular market conditions—and in the financial world, if you are right seventy-eight percent of the time, that pretty much makes you a genius.
Except it wasn’t seventy-eight.
Not even close.
It was more like nineteen. Less reliable than flipping a coin.
Which in the financial world makes you indistinguishable from a dummy. Or a criminal, if (as was the case here) you have been backing your algorithm’s predictions with someone else’s money.
When the Golden Lemon’s accumulated losses had reached—deep breath—604 million euros—Nicky had been doubling down on his bets—someone finally noticed. But desperate to avoid more awful headlines—the institution in question had nearly been finished off by an earlier scandal—they covered up the whole affair, erased Nicky from their corporate history, created a wholly new identity for their rogue trader and bound him (and everyone who knew) in a spiderweb of confidential non-disclosure agreements so tight that the story has remained the City’s fourth biggest dirty secret to this day.
Don’t ask me about the other three. Seriously, don’t ask me!
There are specialist consultants who do this sort of delicate concealment work for big corporations; their role is “deniable” and their fees are hidden in balance sheets as something innocuous like “property dilapidations.” It is a mark of how badly the whole affair needed
